15 May 2020

Small Cap Feast

Small Cap Feast – 15 May 2020

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Breakfast Buffet

EKF Diagnostics 47.2p £214.5m (EKF.L)

The Company announced on 27 April 2020 that it expected further orders worth over $3m for May and that it was in the process of doubling capacity at its Boerne, Texas site for the reagent used in the manufacture of the Primestore MTM device, in order to fulfil those orders and anticipated additional future orders. EKF now confirms that it has received further orders from Longhorn totalling $9.4m for the two months ending July. The majority of these further orders will be for the same core reagent manufactured by EKF.

The additional contribution now indicated for June under the Longhorn manufacturing contract means that the Company expects to further exceed the overall management budgets for H1 2020 more confidently than was noted on 27 April. EKF now expects to deliver Group revenues of at least £25m for the six months ended 30 June 2020 (H1 2019: £21.44m) and adjusted EBITDA of at least £7.5m, a 34% increase on the same period last year (H1 2019: £5.58m).

Venture Life 68p £57m (VLG.L)

The specialist in developing, manufacturing and commercialising products for the international self-care market, notes the research published yesterday in the journal Function, which supports the idea that using mouthwash should be considered as a way to reduce transmission of enveloped viruses such as COVID-19. The findings made reference to mouthwashes containing, among other things, cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC), which is the main ingredient in Venture Life’s key mouthwash brand – Dentyl Dual Action.

Keywords Studios 1493p £980m (KWS.L)

Completion of placing raising gross proceeds of approximately £100 million. Placing Shares have been issued at a price of 1,450 pence. Despite the background of the gaming industry’s general resilience to COVID-19 and structural growth drivers, the Group is expecting to see some stress in predominantly smaller service providers, which are typically single location and service with fewer clients and less able to weather the disruption. This is likely to result in an increased number of acquisition opportunities for Keywords Studios, with some targets now more inclined to re-engage previously stale exploratory conversations.

AVACTA Group 126p £262m (AVCT.L)

Several of the Affimer reagents recently generated for development of a point-of-care COVID-19 antigen saliva test have now also been shown to block the interaction between the virus’ spike protein and ACE2, a receptor on human cells that is key to the virus infection pathway.

Avacta has already successfully generated a large number of Affimer reagents that bind to the SARS-COV-2 virus’ spike protein as part of its partnership with Cytiva (formerly GE Healthcare Life Sciences and now part of Danaher Corp). As previously announced, Avacta and Cytiva are working together to develop a rapid point-of-care COVID-19 antigen saliva test to be mass produced for large-scale population screening and for self-testing by consumers. Large pharmaceutical companies, such as AstraZeneca and GSK, are now starting programmes to develop neutralising antibodies in an attempt to block the SARS-COV-2 spike protein’s interaction with ACE2. Avacta has now demonstrated that several Affimer reagents also perform this blocking function and the Company is now seeking a partner that has the resources available to develop a neutralising Affimer therapy as quickly as possible.

Sumo Group 188p £285m (SUMO.L)

Acquisition of Lab42, a cross-platform work for hire studio, providing co-development and full game development services, for a total cash consideration of $0.6 million. The Lab42 studio has worked on 17 projects for console, PC and mobile, since it was established in January 2015. Past and present clients include Sega Europe Publishing, Klei Entertainment, Aspyr, Ripstone, Dovetail Games and Payload Studios. Lab42 holds an exclusive licence to use the World Snooker Tour brand and was sole developer on the photo-realistic, sports simulation game Snooker 19 for all major consoles and PC, published by Ripstone. In the year ended 31 December 2019, Lab42 reported unaudited revenue of £1.4m.

D4t4 Solutions 177.5p £71.5m (D4T4.L)

Launch of Celebrus Version 9.2 with newly embedded machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Celebrus, D4t4’s enterprise software solution, captures and instantly activates data across all digital channels to enable customer analytics and hyper-personalisation through one-to-one marketing in real-time. “Celebrus 9.2 will provide our global enterprise customers with a notable advantage when it comes to the capture and instant activation of vast amounts of customer intent data in real-time.”

Sunrise Resources 0.125p £4.1m (SRES.L)

Further to its announcement of 26 March 2020, that the Environmental Assessment (EA) and Supplemental Environmental Reports (SERs) for its CS Pozzolan-Perlite Project in Nevada, USA has been released for public comment. “We will move to initiate first production of perlite and natural pozzolan for larger scale customer trials as soon as possible after we receive a positive permitting decision with the expectation that this will transition to commercial production in due course on the commitment of potential customers to sales contracts.”

TruFin 16p £12.9m (TRU.L)

FY Dec19 results from the group of companies that are niche lenders and early payment providers. · Gross revenues from continuing operations were £7.3m for the year ended 31 December 2019, representing year-on-year growth of 68%

During 2019 the Group demerged Distribution Capital Finance Ltd , sold its stake in Zopa Group Limited and acquired majority stakes in Playstack Limited and Vertus Capital Limited.

Group revenues for Q1 2020 were £2.1m (unaudited), representing growth of 36% over the same period in 2019

Despite the headwind from the Covid-19 pandemic, April 2020 saw the Group experience revenue growth of not less than 45% over April 2019 (unaudited).

boohoo Group 355p £4.2bn (BOO.L)

Further to the announcement made on 14 May 2020 entitled “Proposed Accelerated Bookbuild to raise gross proceeds of up to approximately £200 million”, the Bookbuild has closed and the Group has raised gross proceeds of £197.7 million at 34op. The Group intends to use the net proceeds of the Placing to take advantage of numerous opportunities that are likely to emerge in the global fashion industry over the coming months. The Group continues to review a number of possible M&A opportunities and will update shareholders as required.

Arc Minerals 1.78 £13.1m (ARCM.L)

£2.37m raise at 1.7p. The company will utilise the proceeds from the Placing to fund the drilling programme across the Zamsort and Zaco licences targeting exploration works over the anomalies that have been identified and for further technical studies on the Cheyeza East prospect, as well as for general working capital purposes. $1.5m of convertible notes also converting at 1.7p.

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